Wild understood that the battle he was fighting on Elephant Island was not primarily physical. The men could hunt enough food to survive; the island was a rookery and provided reasonably adequate protein. The shelter, while miserable, was adequate to the purpose. What could kill them was the conviction, individual and then collective, that they were not going to get out — the progressive erosion of the belief that rescue was possible, which would reduce the daily activities of survival from purposeful effort to the mechanical continuation of futile motion.
He fought this every morning. He fought it every evening. He won.
When Shackleton’s voice came across the water on August 30, 1916, from the deck of the Yelcho, the question he shouted to the men on the shore was the same one he had been asking himself for four months: Are you all well?
Wild answered from the shore: All safe, all well.
It was true.
## The Scientific Record
The expedition had set out to cross Antarctica. It never got close. But it had also set out, as all the major expeditions of that era did, to gather scientific data, and some of that data survived the ordeal.
Robert Clark was the expedition biologist. He had spent months collecting biological specimens — marine life caught in the ship’s drag nets, samples taken from the ice, observations made from the ship’s deck. When the Endurance sank, all of his specimens went with it. The collection he had built over a year of work, in conditions of extreme difficulty, was lost.